Witches, frog-gods, and the deepening schism of Internet religions
The knee-jerk reaction to online culture is to despair at what the human soul has become.
It’s a very understandable reaction. You’re suddenly confronted with a fleet of mouth-breathing fuckwits who live in this half-formed hinterland between meaning and non-meaning. Where everything is deadly serious because everything matters, but it’s also a joke because nothing matters, which is why it’s so funny, but also why no one should laugh at me because I’m right and you’re wrong. Not even growing up in this quagmire of half-truths can make one understand it because not understanding it is the point. At least from my vantage point. I could be wrong.
However, the more you brave this grease-fire of pure stupidity and try to view it with some historical context in mind, something strange happens. You start to see this happen before. The First World War fundamentally changed the way that people saw the world, and you had people creating art that reflected the meaningless, confusing nature of their new reality. Memes are just Dadaist expressionism, after all. However, there’s only so far that people can go with nothing more than the terrifying vacuum at the heart of reality fuelling them.
Humanity needs to believe in something. It’s basic human nature. We need something bigger than ourselves to add meaning to our actions. It can be community, it can be faith, it can be politics, and it’s most likely a mixture of all three. Thanks to the magic of the internet, we have had our need for meaning and belief exploited. We can find people who share our most niche desires and build… maybe not communities but something resembling them with other people online. Then, like all cults do, they develop.
What are some of these internet religions?
Part of the whole point of them is being completely unintelligible to those who look in on them. You either get it or you don’t, an attitude which, as mentioned earlier, the internet has already hypercharged. This gets doubly tiresome when you take into account the fact that the internet runs on engagement and division. So this Cronenbergian body-horror mash-up of identity politics, real politics, humour, posture and trolling gets turned into something it was never meant to be. Something to believe in.
Two good examples of this come from two internet cults that might fancy themselves as arcane warriors. Two sides of the current war for the soul of America. On the right, the cult of Kek. A bunch of inbred, fascist plankton who have built their moral compasses on the fact that both Pepe the Frog and Kek, the Egyptian God of Primordial Darkness, are both anthropomorphic frogs. That is, if you ignore the countless representations of Kek where he’s a cat. Bring that up to them and you’re just taking the joke too seriously, bro.
On the other, you have Tumblr witches. A generation of people brought up on Charmed, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and LiveJournal and have devoted themselves to hexing and cursing the figureheads of the patriarchal systems of oppression that currently run the world. Except that none of them actually believe that that’s what they’re doing if you ask, it’s just a support network for people victimised by the world. It’s just the weirdos that seriously believe that they’re actually doing magic. So they say.
I trust I don’t have to point out that these people are very much two sides of the same coin. These are all people utterly lost in the world, who’ve found a community and have gone a little too far with it. Of course, one set of these people are using this community to prop up fascists and autocrats, so one will always be on the wrong side of history and have to hold that L, but before you judge too harshly dear reader, think on this.
You might think each of the people in these groups are lonely losers living out fantasies to cope with empty lives. You might even be right about that. However, the world is sliding further into isolationism. People are lonelier than ever. You never know what you’d sacrifice for community until you truly need it, and sometime soon, you yourself will probably find that out whether you want to or not. What will you become afterwards?